1

Building the Jamestown Colony

•The French settled in the land we call Canada today. •The Spanish settled throughout the southern Americas. •The Dutch settled in present-day New York.

The people from England were also determined to set up colonies in the Americas.

2

The First English Colony at Roanoke

In 1565, Queen Elizabeth of England allowed Sir Walter Raleigh to raise money for a colony in the Americas.

The colonists landed on Roanoke an island off the coast of present day North Carolina.

Within a year the colonists ran short of food and they were quarreling with their neighboring Indians.

When an English ship stopped in the harbor, Raleigh and many of the settlers sailed home.

3

•In 1567, Sir Walter Raleigh, sent John White, one of the original settlers, along with women and children back to Roanoke.

•When supplies ran low, White returned back to England, leaving 117 colonists behind.

•There was a war in England with Spain so White could not return back for three years to help the colonists.

•When White finally came back to Roanoke he found that the settlers disappeared without a trace. Today no one knows what happened to these colonists.

4

Challenge and Survival at JamestownAbout twenty years AFTER the disappearance of Roanoke, in 1606, King James I sent a charter to the Virginia Company of London.

A charter is a legal document giving certain rights to a person or company.

The charter gave the Virginia Company the right to settle on land on the Atlantic coast.

The land was called Virginia. The charter granted the people of Virginia the same rights as English citizens.

5

The Virginia Company named their settlement Jamestown, in 1607, after their King, James I.

By 1608 the town was near failure due to poor management.

Captain John Smith saved the settlement by forcing the people to plant crops and give up searching for gold.

Governors sent by the Virginia Company ran the colony like a military outpost people were very unhappy with this type of government.

John Smith was worried that a military outpost would not attract new settlers to Jamestown.

6

To attract more people to move to Jamestown, the Virginia Company set up a different type of government. They set up a Virginia charter modeled from English government.

They elected male representatives to the government, called burgesses. The burgesses met in an assembly called the House of Burgesses. Together with the governor and his council, they made the laws for the colony.

The House of Burgesses marked the beginning of a representative government. In a representative government, voters elect representatives to make laws for them.

Learn more about the House of Burgesses by reading page 92 in your

textbook

7

Click on the Magna Carta to learn more about it

English Traditions The idea that people had political rights was deeply rooted in English history. In 1215 English nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, or Great Charter. This document said the King could not raise taxes without first consulting the great nobles and church leaders.

In time these rights were extended to other people and this council grew into a representative assembly, called the Parliament. The Parliament was divided into the House of Lords, made up of nobles, and the elected House of Commons.

How is this similar to the government in the United States of America?

Very few rich people had the right to vote and the monarchs (Kings) had to obey the laws.